


The School Up the Hill

by Kanthia



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Aggressively mathematical, Alternate Universe - Boarding School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:15:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23989471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kanthia/pseuds/Kanthia
Summary: Byleth, a perfectly adequate graduate of teachers college, is content to float through life when the kids from the fancy boarding school up the hill call in, asking for an interview. Prefect training for their upcoming Grade 12 year to qualify for house captainship: had to interview an alumni or someone related to alumni who was doing volunteer work, found her by searching up her dad, could they come in around 3 on Friday?(modern AU, slow burn Seteleth)
Relationships: My Unit | Byleth/Seteth
Comments: 1
Kudos: 14





	The School Up the Hill

**Author's Note:**

> yeah this one is pure self-indulgence lol

Most people don’t become teachers by accident, but Byleth did; sort of meandered into a teaching program after an enlightening but ultimately directionless undergrad where, when the dust settled, she had scraped enough credits together for a major in mathematics and a minor in philosophy. The latter could be forgiven for the former -- lots of companies out there looking to hire and flaunt a female actuary or statistician on their corporate website -- but spreadsheets had never really been her forte, nor the dollar valuation of human life.

She’d fallen into mathematics for the abstraction and the beauty of it, the ways that matrices folded into themselves and blossomed open like a wartime commander and their battalions, how manipulating a vector subspace was like looking inward to find the truth in one’s own heart, how calculus was poetry in brutality, a derivative tearing into functions like teeth into a carcass or a side of beef, finding infinity in the spaces between numbers. She hit her ceiling around the time she was asked on a final exam to reproduce the proof of the completeness theorem of parametrizing functions on complex hypersurfaces X ⊂ Pⁿ, walked out of that course with a pass by some miracle.

So no grad school. Not that she’d wanted to, anyways; by fourth year she’d grown tired of the library basement and the endless, grating silence broken only by the scratching of pencil on paper. Found her kicks, and maybe her meaning, elsewhere: dive bars where she could watch the world from a corner and chew big thoughts over cheap drinks, hiking trips where the silence was a blanket and not a weight, the local 24/7 gym in or around three in the morning. Quiet coffee dates with close friends. Pizza and beer with compatriots after exams. Watching the sun rise from the wrong side of the night. She fell into a little volunteer group that took local kids on camping trips, and when somebody mentioned that they were off to teachers college, she figured there were worse things to do while trying to figure out a direction in life.

(There were better things to do, too -- things that would make her, rather than cost her, money and time. And she did feel a little guilty about being surrounded by people who really, _really_ wanted a career in education. But there was always excitement around women in high school math, so she held her tongue, scraped through her practica with a series of unspectacular reviews centred around the word _adequate_ , and wrote a half-decent final paper on the use of the Thinking Classroom in the study of combinatorics.)

Then June rolled around and with convocation on the horizon she’d gone back to the volunteer camp, found herself based on age and years of experience in an administrative role, answering phones and composing emails and waiting for the summer and wondering about September, staring out the window, and thinking, and thinking…

...Which is exactly what she’d been doing in mid-August when the kids from the fancy boarding school up the hill called in, asking for an interview. Prefect training for their upcoming Grade 12 year to qualify for house captainship: had to interview an alumni or someone related to alumni who was doing volunteer work, found her by searching up her dad, could they come in around 3 on Friday?

(She phoned up her dad immediately after agreeing, which is when she learned that yes, Jeralt Reus Eisner was indeed salutatorian his graduating year at Garreg Mach School, the fancy boarding school up the hill. He’d never felt the need to tell her as much, and felt mildly put out that little Ally was now the head guidance counsellor, calling himself Mr. Rangeld. You fall out of contact and lose track of a couple of years…)

* * *

Jeralt insists on dropping into the office -- which is really just a one-bedroom student rental at street level, featuring an ageing couch and an even older desktop PC -- on the day of the interview to make good on his promise of rewiring their phone cables because shit, the camp’s held together with small donations and duct tape, and if he hasn’t changed much then _someone_ will need to keep Alois entertained so that those kids can get any meaningful work done. Byleth half-heartedly considered wearing something more grown-up than a tank top and shorts before conceding that the kids were going to outdress her regardless of what she showed up in.

They pull up in a branded bus painted in the GMS gold-and-green, prominently featuring the school mascot -- _Go Dragons!_ \-- and the driver in a suit clearly not tailored for someone so broad tumbles out first, bounds over and gathers Byleth in a hug that threatens to crush her spine before announcing that he was _so glad_ to hear that Jeralt’s kid turned out so great, _so glad_ to meet her, _so glad…_

“Pardon Mr. Rangeld,” comes a voice from behind him, as Alois disengages to go treat her father to the same warm welcome. “He’s been rather excited all week, practically begged us to chaperone.”

Her name is Edelgard and she’s still wearing her school uniform, black-and-gold blazer and black-and-red kilt and pressed white shirt, hair up tied neatly in school-branded ribbons. She shakes Byleth’s hand and smiles gently. Introduces her classmates Dimitri, also still in his uniform with a blue tie and a dark grey pant; and behind him, Claude, who appears to have haphazardly changed into a well-worn t-shirt and jeans on the bus ride over.

They don’t seem all too stuffy and holier-than-thou, though Edelgard steps carefully and Dimitri keeps his back straight and Claude leans back and whistles as she invites them in. Really, they kind of remind Byleth of your regular garden-variety eleventh-graders trying to elbow each other out of the way for student council president, not like the heir to the Hresvelg fortune, or the eldest son of the Blaiddyd Corp CEO, or the rumoured Riegan grandson whose birth had been splashed across the grocery store tabloids of Byleth’s childhood. Said Riegan is currently poking fun at said Blaiddyd for refusing to take off his blazer despite the August heat, and Hresvelg is pulling a lined notebook and adorable glittery red mechanical pencil out of her backpack, and would Miss Eisner consent to an audio recording?

“Ah,” Byleth says, “Yeah. I consent.”

Edelgard fires off questions about the organization and its history and what they do and where their funding comes from; she starts with softball questions and eases into things that Byleth needs a bit more to chew over. The interview is structured with a ruthless and practiced intensity that reminds Byleth of the practice interviews she had in teachers college.

After she’s done, Dimitri concedes that Edelgard had covered most of the questions he’d prepared, but wonders if she could share with them a few highlights of her time volunteering. It smacks of someone who’s put a lot of thought into this, and she answers gladly: sunrises, cold evenings around a campfire, the pride in one’s own hard work, the sense of giving to something bigger than oneself, the sense of camaraderie.

Claude notices her diploma where Jeralt had, against her wishes, hung it on the wall. “You have a teaching degree?”

“Yes,” she says. “Why do you ask?”

Which is how, four days later, Byleth finds herself in an interview with the headmistress of Garreg Mach School.

* * *

“You seem to have made quite the impression on our prefects,” Madame Rhea says, from the far end of an elegant and massive wooden table. They are surrounded by enormous portraits of what Byleth assumes to be founding board members or past headmasters, and she sips uncomfortably at the offered ginger ale. “Please, Rhea is fine. I still fondly remember when your father was a student here. No wonder you turned out such an outstanding young woman.”

Byleth has never been called outstanding in her life. She’s been called flat, and emotionless, and adequate; and when she did roller derby they called her the Ashen Demon, but that’s neither here nor there. So instead she says: “Dad never told me he went here.”

“Curious,” Rhea says.

In teachers college they had stressed the importance of reading over policy documents and demonstrating a robust understanding of trends in assessment when in an interview. She’d gotten a C+ in a mock interview for forgetting to refer back to the core competencies as outlined in the official curricula. This, on the other hand, seems to be Rhea selling the school on her: the venerated traditions, the quality students and teachers, the professional development opportunities…

...Turns out one of the staff, ironically (conveniently?) a houseparent-slash-math-teacher, had been dragged off campus in handcuffs earlier that month for involvement in a massive pyramid scheme that had hit a bunch of GMS parents right in the bank account. They had just started the first round of interviews when Claude had noticed Byleth’s diploma, and what is a private school if not an opportunity to consolidate a little nepotism?

“It’s not like that,” Rhea says with a kindhearted chuckle, when Byleth says as much in some more well-chosen words. “While it’s true that your father earned you that initial interview with the prefects-in-training, in truth, it seems you won over the students. I would be doing them a disservice if I didn’t at least give you a chance.”

“If I may,” interjects the other presence in the interview -- the vice-principal and director of academics, a stern-eyed fellow named Mr. Seteth. He has been keeping meticulous notes and asking actual interview questions, probing her for work experience, testing her knowledge of her subject area. Though he was caught by surprise by her proof of the law of cosines, he has nonetheless been open about his disapproval. “Rhea, we know nothing about this -- this child, and there are far more qualified candidates for the position. If you’d --”

“-- Peace, Seteth.” Rhea holds up her hand and smiles warmly. “Edelgard was endeared to her after a simple fifteen-minute interview. Even you can agree that there is something special about her.”

Seteth purses his lips and sniffs, but says nothing.

Also, the school needs a new electrician, which Jeralt has half-heartedly agreed to -- so, two birds one stone. Chips in place. Rhea gives Byleth a campus tour, points out the Blaiddyd Athletic Centre and the Hresvelg Academic Building; the theatre -- sorry, the Gloucester Centre for Performing Arts; and Aegir Hall, the cafeteria; Byleth finds her attention drawn towards one of the many stone fountains, thinks it looks a little like if Hogwarts was less a medieval castle and more a sprawling medieval fort town full of well-manicured gardens and lawns. There’s a sauna and a rugby pitch next to the soccer field, a greenhouse for the students, and plans are in the works for an Olympic swimming pool as soon as the board of directors approves the budget.

They walk up a short hill, a cobblestone path bordered by cherry trees, that takes them to the dormitories -- three boys’, and three girls’. The students, Rhea explains, are sorted upon acceptance into one of three houses based on family ties or, in absence of those, personal preference.

The hilltop affords them a view of the nearby lake where the rowing team practices. It’s a stately little lake, brilliant blue ringed by green trees, and Byleth is momentarily stunned by the beauty of the sun-dappled water, the soft breeze in late August, the path ahead of her.

“There’s no pressure to accept,” Rhea says, gently. “I am not a perfect judge of character or potential, but I think you would be a good fit for this school.”

Two days later, Byleth emails in her acceptance for a math teaching and houseparenting job for the coming school year; and an hour after that, a hand-written contract arrives by fax for her to sign, stipulating salary and teaching load and compensation in housing and meals in the campus cafeteria; and an hour after signing and sending that in, gets a call on the camp office phone, which she assumes -- if she can make out what he’s trying to say -- is Alois sharing his excitement for the year ahead.

**Author's Note:**

> find me, as always, on [tumblr](https://kanthia.tumblr.com/)


End file.
